Armor
Armor is a class of items that mitigate damage and are equipped in the different armor slots (head, shoulder, back, chest, wrist, hands, waist, legs, feet, and off-hand for shield). This sort of armor contributes to the Armor attribute, a numerical value that translates into physical damage mitigation in combat. Some non-armor items may grant an armor attribute bonus. Armor Types Four armor types are available for Player characters to equip: * 16px Cloth - Priest, Mage, Warlock * 16px Leather - Rogue, Druid, Hunter, Shaman * 16px Mail - Warrior, Paladin, Hunter (with training, level 40), Shaman (with training, at level 40) * 16px Plate - Warrior (with training, at level 40), Paladin (with training, at level 40) * Shield - Warrior, Paladin, Shaman Armor Equipment Slots There are nine core slots that a character can equip armor items into and — depending on their class — a character can optionally carry a shield in their off hand. The nine slots for equipping armor to are the character's head, shoulder, back, chest, waist, legs, feet, wrist, and hands. If a shield is held in the off hand the character is limited to using weapons that require only one hand to use. Note: There are also rings, trinkets and weapons with armor on them. Armor Damage Reduction Formula According to Blizzard UI elements, the formulas for Damage Reduction are as follows for WoW 2.0.8 Levels 1 - 59 DR% = Armor / (Armor+400+85*Level) Levels 60+ DR% = Armor / (Armor+400+85*(Level+4.5*(Level-59))) Consider the following table which can be derived from the above formula for a lvl 70 tank taking 1000 DPS of "raw" damage: Armor 0 5k 10k 15k 20k 25k 30k DPS taken 1000 666 500 410 350 300 260 DPS reduced by the last 5k armor 0 333 166 90 60 50 40 relative DPS reduction by the last 5k armor 0 33% 25% 18% 15% 14% 13% As can be seen, the effectiveness of adding another 5k of armor is getting lower, there is a "diminishing returns" effect with respect to the DPS reduction. It isn't as pronounced as it may seem looking at the absolute numbers, though. The last line shows that the relative value of 5k armor drops from 33% to 13%, meaning that at the start, one point of AC will be about three times as effective in terms of DPS reduction as near the end. Thus, armor exhibits diminishing returns with respect to the total amount of healing needed to keep a tank alive. However, in terms of absolute time to live with respect to melee attacks, armor has no diminishing return effect. Given a constant melee DPS amount, each additional point of armor (whether it be from 0 to 1 or from 30000 to 30001) will increase the tanks time to live by the same effective amount. 1k additional armor increases time to live by approximately 9.47%, as shown by the graph. The formula for calculating time to live with respect to melee attacks is: Effective time to live = 1/(1-DR%) * Base time to live Where DR% is calculated according to the above formula. In this way, armor can be thought of as increasing the effective health of the tank with respect to melee attacks. Since DR caps at 75%, effective time to live caps at 400% of the tanks base time to live (time to live if the tank had no armor). Prior to hitting the cap, armor is certainly a very desirable stat for tanks, but difficult to find. Most items of similar quality and rarity have similar armor values, and extra armor can be found only very rarely. Armor Category:Game Terms References Elitist Jerks single forum post Category:Attributes